I concluded yesterday’s post with an observation that old media and new media seem hopelessly divided on the subject of steroids in sports.

The same could be said, to some degree, about the subject of analytics, especially in baseball. While a number of high-profile sports journalists (Joe Posnanski, Bill Simmons) immediately come to mind as those who’ve embraced numbers beyond traditional boxscores, others have not. Still others, like me, remain in the math-challenged netherworld in between: Not dismissive, but not yet having plunged deeply into the realm that Bill James created.

(Perhaps before diving into his abstracts and historical doorstoppers, I might want to try this: “How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball.” The reviews are mixed, but given my need to be guided by traditional narrative, it may be the perfect gentle entry.)

As numbers mavens are on the rise, the refuseniks are spitting out their venom with greater vengeance. Mitch Albom’s bone-headed tripe last winter over the American League MVP race earned him plenty of derision (including perhaps Deadspin’s most glorious takedown of anyone, ever), although he knew damn well what was coming when he wrote that there’s a “divide between those who like to watch the game of baseball and those who want to reduce it to binary code.”

Bleacher Report made an attempt to broker a truce in all this, ultimately paraphrasing Rodney King: “So then…Can everyone get along?”

Well, no. It’s far easier for the sabermetricians to bash away at the bashable Albom, who has plenty of company in the entrenched foxholes of newspaper hacks.

The latest example: Mac Engel of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who has parlayed his ink-stained wretchiness into a blog designed to troll, and I would imagine with the desired page view results.

Last week he outdid even Albom, fearing the spread of numbers numbskullery beyond the national pastime:

This absurd baseball math obsession is now spilling over into basketball, hockey and football; in a few months, this trend will turn your child’s dodgeball game into a series of where is the best place to put little Jimmy so as to ensure his greatest chances of being able to dip, dive, duck and dodge.

Again, these words are designed to inflame, and they did. While Engel is genuinely unimpressed with the obsession over pitch counts, he was only too happy to follow up by linking to his bashers. The substance of what he writes may be old-school newspaper hacktastic, but he seems to have mastered the new-school approach of eliciting reaction (typically outraged) above all else. Indeed, Engel seems to be comfortable with his feet in both worlds when he writes:

I reached out to Tim to do something I’ve never done before: Engage in a discussion with a reader about a column. He was nice enough to agree.

What a brilliant pose: Coming down from a walled-off, print-centric mountain to make contact with an actual reader, natch, somebody with a different view.

It’s all smug, ginned-up wise-assery, in spite of a rather candid conversation. Instead of using his unlimited blog space to ask someone to help him better understand the numbers, Engel perpetuates an enduring persona of the doofus sportswriter.

Alex Belth — one of this blog’s favorites — is expanding his curatorial powers with a new feature on Deadspin called The Stacks.

He describes it as a “blog devoted to classic magazine and newspaper writing,” most of it sports, but not all. The initial posts are reprints of pieces by Gay Talese, John Schulian and Leigh Montville, with related links, as well as blogs, artwork and other material that has caught his finely-tuned eye for the good stuff thanks to his magnificent Bronx Banter blog. What a treat already.

In his introduction, Belth explains that his growing fascination with mid-20th century popular culture has inspired him to start this project:

The point is simple: find classic pieces of writing that can’t be found on-line and give them a home. Introduce them to a new audience or present them to readers who haven’t read them in years. That’s what I’ll offer in this space, a simulcast of what’s being reprinted in this Banter series.

This off-shoot site is intended to be a living archive, so there will be material that is reprinted for the first time on-line but also, I’ll provide plenty of posts with links to worthy material that’s already on-line but that you may have missed. It won’t all be sports, it won’t all be links to articles. Sometimes it will be interviews or author profiles.

If I were a pious soul, I’d say Belth is doing the Lord’s work here. It’s not a nostalgia trip to preserve “offline” classics and introduce them to new readers, but the realization of the best of both old and new media in one place.

I’ve never been all that conflicted about doping in sports.

This probably makes me an amoral, if not evil, American to some.

As I have watched Tour de France cyclists pedal high into the Alps over the years, I have thought to myself more than once: “If they’re not taking something, they’re crazy.”

Before there were anabolic steroids, riders downed all kinds of substances to gain a competitive boost, if not an advantage. Including strychnine.

But later this week, these historical realities will be drowned out by a new round of outrage that one of America’s greatest sporting heroes was a “cheater.”

As I write this, Lance Armstrong is taping his interview with Oprah Winfrey, supposedly confessing to doping months after America’s taxpayer-funded anti-doping agency dropped its load of documents, and as has he continued years of denials. Until now.

While the interview with the queen of America’s confessional culture won’t air until Thursday, there’s already plenty of media pontification that figures to go over the top later in the week.

Former Armstrong defender Buzz Bissinger “came clean” in his Monday column in The Daily Beast, alleging he was duped.

I also anticipate the interview will include plenty of “contrived contrition” — the speculation is Armstrong is doing this to earn U.S. Anti-Doping Agency reinstatement to compete in sanctioned Ironman competitions — but I’m not buying that Bissinger or anyone who feels betrayed by him was “played.”

As I have been blogging here for some time, so many cycling fans, Americans and yes, media representatives, have chosen to look the other way, failed to understand the history of the sport or exist in a state of denial about what’s been known in the cycling community for decades.

Bissinger, Rick Reilly and others played themselves, easily taken by a great American storyline: Ambitious young athlete battles cancer, wins seven Tour de France titles in a sport dominated by Europeans, serves as an inspiration to other cancer patients and young athletes, etc., etc.

The purity of this storyline, we now fret, was just too good to be true. That Armstrong is alleged to have bullied, threatened and intimidated others makes this fresh reality even uglier. It’s easy to complain about being lied to now.

But it is precisely because of our Puritanical culture — where the redemptive forum furnished by Oprah Winfrey culminates the spectacle of a desperate, fallen celebrity begging for another chance, if not forgiveness — that we have arrived at this point.

When Congress criminalized anabolic steroids in the wake of the Ben Johnson revelations and opened another wasteful front on the War on Drugs, demonizing the use of these substances became particularly necessary for those pushing for “clean” sports. But as I noted regarding the Baseball Hall of Fame voting last week, some of the giant figures of the game’s Golden Age were less-than-secret pill-poppers, a fact conveniently ignored by absolutists who couldn’t summon a vote for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and others.

This stance of zero tolerance has increased over the past 20 or so years, as the Lords of Baseball have been shamed into enforcing anti-doping measures. Last week’s announcement about HGH testing came of their own accord. Whether this is a PR move or something more substantive is a topic for another post, as is the depth of the fever pitch over Armstrong’s doping.

The latter says something about our society beyond feeling “duped” by Armstrong. I suspect it’s our inability, or unwillingness, to have a healthy, adult conversation about steroids that isn’t as black-and-white as the anti-doping zealots, and their true believers in the press, want us to believe.

Now Armstrong is going to be the perpetual butt of jokes, and blamed for bringing down a sport he once helped give unprecedented stature. I don’t mean to be flip about any of this; he’s in a hell of a lot of serious legal and financial trouble (Dave Zirin rounds this up very well) from which he may never fully recover. It would be too easy to say that if we didn’t make steroids use to be such a reprehensible crime (which it isn’t even in its strict legal sense now) none of this would have happened. There would have been nothing to lie, or bully others, about.

But as long as influential journalists remain fully taken by tales of ethically pure athletes, driven only by the love of competition, the desire to extinguish the culture of “dirty” athletes and their dastardly deeds will never be quenched.

The most insufferable, self-righteous examplar of this, Irish journalist David Walsh, is milking Armstrong’s comedown especially hard. He’s been the media’s Elliott Ness figure all along, and gives himself much of the credit for what’s come to pass. Walsh (more on him tomorrow) and his editors couldn’t resist reprinting one of his triumphal it’s really all about me columns over the weekend, as he positions himself to profit — literally — from the media schadenfreude over Lance Armstrong that isn’t going away anytime soon.

I know of only a small handful of people who are so innately independent-minded, so stubbornly (in a good way) committed to the clarity of vision for their work that no institution can contain them.

One of those people is my father, now a retired home builder who left the world of working for cookie-cutter contracting companies by striking out with a partner when my siblings and I were small children. I can remember Sunday drives in our suburban community where Dad would bemoan the “ugly” houses he spotted (and there were many), suggesting a litany of improvements along the way.

Ultimately my father went totally on his own, with only the help of a part-time bookkeeper and referrals from satisfied customers to make a good living designing and building quality, custom-made homes that lived up to his high ideals.

Perhaps the only other individual who comes close to this kind of independence in my experience is fellow basketball writer Kyle Whelliston, a former colleague at Basketball Times. He made a name for himself by creating The Mid-Majority blog long before American sports fans fell in love with George Mason, Butler and VCU at Final Four time.

Whelliston parlayed that early success into a freelancing stint at ESPN.com, where he unfortunately couldn’t ride out the recession, and then his fortunes took an even more difficult turn. At the time, I was newly out of work after taking a newspaper buyout and contributed to one of his sites, Basketball State, that’s a college hoops numbers geek’s delight. I appreciated the chance he gave me to take a different stab at freelancing after many years of cranking out institutional journalism. It wasn’t particularly strong work on my part — it was rather mediocre, actually — but I reflect on them now as baby steps toward a bolder, more creative pursuit of work I’ve always had in mind.

What I didn’t realize until I read Whelliston’s self-published book “Sports Bubble Blues” was how fiercely devoted he was to his unique perspective on college basketball, and much more than that. The book is a collection of posts from The Mid-Majority for the 2008-09 season, just as I first came into contact with him. In “Sportsguy,” he takes aim at the empire Bill Simmons has created at ESPN (and which now includes NBA studio analysis):

Being the Sports Guy means constructing theories and definitions for others to view the world through, submitted for acceptance or rejection. It means writing things to elicit reaction, not broaden understanding. It means telling people what they already think they know.

. . . . . .

“Sports Guy” is a prison, as much of a ironclad cubbyhole as “Utility Infielder,” “Middle Linebacker” or “Small Forward.” While a master at any of these positions can find fame and success and great riches, I prefer a different road. I choose independence, anonymity and relative poverty. I choose freedom.

While this may sound harsh and unsparing, it’s not the Simmons-bashing that’s prevalent on, say, Deadspin. This is a critique of the substance of one of sports media’s first digital-age superstars, who took on established sportswriters (sometimes brutally) to forge his own path to prominence.

Now Simmons has become one of those figures at the top, getting his corporate employer to subsidize the Grantland site and the lauded (and deservedly so) “30 for 30″ sports documentary series. In the namesake post of his book, published in early 2009 as he was appealing to readers for donations, Whelliston wrote a paragraph that resonates for me as strongly now as it did at the time:

I’ve been living off the Sports Bubble for so long that I’ve lost touch with the actual value of what I do, and I have no tangible idea if this operation would survive with a lessened subsidy. Nobody asked me to start covering mid-majors this way, nobody demanded it at any point, and the market didn’t require a smartass traveling reporter who talks as much about losing as winning, who posts more about philosophy than basketball. It seemed like the right way to do it, so that’s the way I do it.

Even before prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan’s recent declaration of independence, I’ve been thinking about this constantly. Whelliston is off the road these days, with The Mid-Majority the work of readers across the country offering up their game reports. Grantland has prompted a number of stylistic competitors, most of them also corporate-owned. While there is good work being done in all of these places, my concerns about the viability of go-it-alone sites are growing, frankly.

It is the dearth of those singular voices, unafraid to run away from the herd and create something bracingly honest and not just for the sake of effect, that’s been noticeable. Where is the Andrew Sullivan of sports? Or Nate Silver, who in a recent interview underscored that not just his approach but his personality is “to really enjoy the work you are doing and not cheapen yourself.”

I hope I’m fretting far too much about this, and that it will not obstruct my aims of taking this blog in a more dynamic direction. There’s plenty of inspired work and good examples to draw from, but at times they seem like they’re a little to hard to find.

Now employed full-time in the main office of Wieden+Kennedy, Bethlehem Shoals of Free Darko fame explains on The Awl his break from writing. It includes, but is hardly limited to, his becoming a father last year:

I don’t feel like I fell from grace, though. Anyone remotely acquainted with the realities of publishing—especially for those of us who sprung up from the muck of blogs and other online writings—can see why the wind might have blown me in this direction. When the last few rounds of meal tickets were passed out, I wasn’t on the list. The phone wasn’t ringing, I stink at pitching editors, and really, I was driving myself insane trying to get by on seasonal work and a slew of web pieces that, if you added them all up on a good week, might—might!—be enough to get by. The thrill was gone, something had died inside, and when a job in advertising came along, I was especially receptive. At that point, I could just as easily have been swayed by the right cult or elite armed force recruiter.

At Deadspin, John Koblin points out Michael Wilbon’s laments about what the latter thinks is a lack of stellar sportswriting from the past year, then sets up the ex-Washington Postie perfectly as a segue for rolling out the best sports shouters of 2012:

What better example than Wilbon himself, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption—a man who abandoned prose so he could be adamant about things on television?

The last few paragraphs of “The Franchise,” Michael MacCambridge’s 1997 history of Sports Illustrated that I finished reading over the weekend, summarize far more than the essence of a magazine that changed the way Americans look at the world of sports.

They come closer to anything I’ve read since Michael Novak’s “Joy of Sports” in underscoring why we give a damn about sports, and why they really do matter, far beyond the raw immediacy of a final score.

The speaker is Ray Cave, a top lieutentant to managing editor André Laguerre, who MacCambridge writes crafted SI during the 1960s and the early 1970s “into the last of the truly sophisticated mass market magazines, and the only sophisticated one to rise in the age of television:”

“Laguerre infected his staff with a sense of the consequences of sport — to the society, and to each of us. He felt it was a true mirror of the human condition, a meaningful mirror. It was a sophisticated view of sport, and he insisted that the magazine reflect that sophistication. In hindsight, and certainly in net profit terms, he was probably wrong. Maybe sport is, and was, no more consequential than the Bulls versus the Sonics. Laguerre believed otherwise. But there is no arguing about one thing: you make more money with a hard-sports magazine.”

Right before Christmas, Yahoo! Sports launched a new investigative sports blog, Not for Attribution, featuring posts from Charles Robinson, among others. Thus far it has gone heavy on, but has not been limited to, NCAA and college recruiting issues.

Counting down to the anticipated attack from Jason Whitlock.

For Longreads, here’s Jamie Mottram of the USA Today Sports Media Group, who like his colleague Dan Shanoff gave Tom Scocca’s Deadspin piece on the Baltimore Orioles exalted status, as well as Charlie Pierce on Robert Griffin III.

David Roth of The Classical has an eclectic non-sports list, which he explains in terms of stylistic points and the pure enjoyment of reading them:

“Of those, only the latter two live entirely on the web. They’re not about similar things, or written for similar publications or audiences, or really even written in ways that outwardly have much in common. But there’s an energy and vitality to all of them, a sense that the people writing respect their obligation to tell the stories they’ve chosen, but also that they’re intensely into those stories. There are some good jokes and striking sentences and a great deal of elegant (or infuriating) and illusion-free (or opinionated) thought in all of them, but there is not show-offery or grandiosity or stuffiness. They’re stories told and arguments made by people who seem impassioned and informed, and told in the voices—different-sounding, as they should be—of people alive in and engaged with the world and the ideas loose in it, and conversant with both in the fast, open way of the web. I don’t know, maybe it’s just good writing.”

This one from Dan Shanoff, who sold his sports aggregator Quickish to the USA Today Sports Media Group during 2012 and continued to round up great links as he joined its ranks.

His top 12 didn’t include my favorite, Wright Thompson’s great piece from Lionel Messi’s hometown of Rosário, Argentina, which was included in the lengthy “receiving votes” category.

Shanoff disappointingly has nothing in either batch from The Classical, which debuted a year ago. It isn’t corporate-owned but was hatched through a Kickstarter fundraising effort, doesn’t have full-time writers on an expense account and is naturally irreverent and off-beat, almost zine-ishly so.

Flinder Boyd’s recent “The Ricky Rubio Experience” is star-quality stuff. So is Elliott Turner’s “Rope A Dope,” which as I blogged about earlier, laid waste to how anti-doping zealots and sports governing bodies do as they please when it comes to disciplining athletes.

But this is Shanoff’s list, and here’s what he likes the best:

Jonathan Abrams, “The Malice at the Palace: An Oral History,” Grantland

Sam Alipour, “Will You Still Medal In the Morning?” ESPN the Magazine

Chris Ballard, “Man In Full,” Sports Illustrated

Chris Brown, “Luck and Griffin III: The Future Is Now,” Grantland

Bryan Curtis, “The Ballad of the Piggyback Bandit,” Grantland

Spencer Hall, “Bury a Man, Keep a Statue,” SB Nation

Christopher McDougall, “On the Trail of the White Horse,” Outside

Michael Mooney, “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever,” D Magazine

Tom Scocca, “Why the Baltimore Orioles Matter,” Deadspin

Wright Thompson, “Urban Meyer Will Be Home for Dinner,” ESPN the Magazine

Kevin Van Valkenburg, “Games of Chance,” ESPN.com

Dan Wetzel, “Tom Brady’s Daze of Disappointment,” Yahoo Sports

And Shanoff provides liner notes, which note what we’ve been raving about on this blog for a good part of 2012 — longform sportswriting is enjoying an encouraging renaissance on the Web.

But it’s happening in more than four or five places.